14 ms·

So you're saying Google's recruiters don't tell what position they are interviewing for and that they found a 20+ years experienced engineering manager holding

by ozgung 10y ago

So you're saying Google's recruiters don't tell what position they are interviewing for and that they found a 20+ years experienced engineering manager holding patents on computer networking under-qualified for an ordinary site maintenance position. Well, that sounds like a dumb recruitment process.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
raverbashing 10y ago
It seems to me parent's answer only reflects the general attitude at Google: they don't question anything they do, they don't do "customer support" and they don't display humility Yes, I'm not expecting the conversation to have been exactly that, but it shows problems regardless.
- kyrra 10y ago
  Google questions a lot of what it does. It's made up of lots of engineers and other that are on this site and care deeply about the fields we are in. We are always questioning decisions made and try to use data as best as we can to back up those decision. As for customer support, it depends on the product you are talking about. Your free gmail account or $5 purchases through the play store: don't expect a lot of support here (but there is some). If you are using Google Cloud, Apps, AdWords, or other products where you pay, you can expected to get amazing support (this will change with your spend level). For example: on the cloud side, you can pay for support contracts that gets you lots of 1-on-1 time with Google support staff to help you use the services[0]. Or with the new Pixel, there is on-phone support[1]. [0] https://cloud.google.com/support/ https://cloud.google.com/support/ [1] https://madeby.google.com/phone/support/ https://madeby.google.com/phone/support/
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    I am aware of these support channels, but there are a lot of stories of paying customers getting stonewalled. Not to mention cases where non-paying customers or content producers get simply kicked out without recourse - though sometimes Google (and others) are right to act in a certain way
    - ghufran_syed 10y ago
      I used to have project fi, their customer support was quick and helpful, even for complicated things like when the porting out of my number got stuck (not their fault, it was the other carrier)
- rasz_pl 10y ago
  Listen, you have been hired by the greatest software company on the planet, you survived ridiculous recruitment process with multiple pointless whiteboard interviews, CLEARLY you are special. How dare those unworthy peons slander the name of your company? they arent qualified, you are. "customer support"? You are not being paid >200K to sit 8 hours in a chat telling people to turn it off and on again.
rb2k_ 10y ago
> they found a 20+ years experienced engineering manager holding patents on computer networking under-qualified for an ordinary site maintenance position. To be fair, I've interviewed people at previous companies that had patents and 15 years at IBM on their CV and completely failed even the most basic system / coding questions. (fizzbuzz style). There are a lot of people that read great on the CV but then it turns out that they mostly kept a chair warm and organized meetings over the last decade without actually retaining any technical knowledge. Not saying that was the case here, but it happens and it's probably worth checking people on their stated qualifications.
- johndubchak 10y ago
  Perhaps that suggests you're giving them the wrong interview.
  - optimuspaul 10y ago
    I agree. Why the hell would you ask someone at that level basic questions like fizz buzz? It's absurd. I also tend to shy away from asking coding questions in interviews, they don't tell me much about aptitude for critical thinking and culture fit. Skills can be taught but culture is much harder. ... But I'm not saying to throw in some questions that don't prove that they are actually competent, just be casual about it.
    - sziwan 10y ago
      > Why the hell would you ask someone at that level basic questions like fizz buzz? Because there are people applying for software engineering jobs that still can't answer those questions.
      - rizzom5000 10y ago
        If you have a CS degree and cannot answer this type of question in your language of choice, you simply aren't ready for even a junior position in my opinion. This type of coding exercise can potentially answer more questions about the candidate in two minutes than 30 minutes of softball questions about the candidate's past experiences. I think that people who disagree simply haven't done much interviewing or haven't worked on a team with someone who couldn't do much more than copy/paste code from SO.
Morgawr 10y ago
This to me looks like an initial phone screening interview. It's not actually a "technical" interview (there is no code to write and the person that interviews you is a technical recruiter and not an actual engineer). As far as I know (I might be wrong so take this with a grain of salt) your first screening interview is usually used to decide in which direction you want to proceed (for example if you want to be hired as a SWE-SRE or SE-SRE position). It's not far fetched to think that they were just applying some standard questions without having an actual clear position in mind yet. I also agree with the grandparent, I'd be very sceptical about this transcript being 100% accurate.
- kerneis 10y ago
  This. I passed several rounds of interviews at Google over a number of years (phone screening, phone interview, on-site). This is definitely a phone screening, where the recruiter expects "standard" answers to "standard" questions. Remember that interviews are somewhat of a game. Trying to be smart at this stage is the wrong move.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    > This is definitely a phone screening, where the recruiter expects "standard" answers to "standard" questions. I went through a Google phone screen once. (For full disclosure, I've interviewed on-site twice and failed that both times.) One problem posed on the phone screen involved finding the last 1 in an infinite array consisting of a finite number of 1s followed by an infinite number of 0s. I described the search strategy "check index 0/1/2, then progressively square the index until a 0 is found, then use binary search to find the first 0". The screener objected to that strategy on the grounds that successive squaring "grew too fast" and successively doubling the index would be faster overall. Once the call concluded, I looked into it and determined that those two strategies are almost exactly equivalent. This didn't leave me impressed with the phone screen process. Then again, I apparently passed the screen despite making that "mistake". Still, I think the least courtesy you can extend to interviewees is to not correct them when they're right and you're wrong. :/
bluecmd 10y ago
> ordinary site maintenance position Seems you don't know much what Google's SRE job is about.
DannyBee 10y ago
First, it is definitely standard process to tell him (if they didn't, that's a definite failure). Again, remember you only have one side of the story here. I like to try to gather facts before assuming things. IE Ready, aim, fire, not fire, ready, aim. Admittedly more difficult in this case (and certainly, i have no access to it) Second i'm going to point out a few things: Experience may translate into wisdom, it may not. Plenty of companies promote people just because they last long enough. So 20 years experience managing may translate into a high level manager, it may not! I hold a bunch of patents too on compilers and other things, it's not indicative of much in terms of skill, because almost anything is patentable. Lastly, SRE is not an ordinary site maintenance position by any means. I"m not even sure where to begin to correct that. I guess i'd start here: https://landing.google.com/sre/interview/ben-treynor.html https://landing.google.com/sre/interview/ben-treynor.html Does this mean this person is under/overqualified/exactly right? I literally have no idea. I just don't think it's as obvious one way or the other. "Well, that sounds like a dumb recruitment process." Judging an entire recruitment process based on one side of a story from a person who's clearly upset about an interview, and even 3 sentences i wrote on hacker news, seems ... silly. If you want to do it, okay. But everyone in this entire thread seems to be making snap judgements without a lot of critical thinking. That makes me believe a lot of people here have a ton of pre-existing biases they are projecting onto this in one direction or the other (and you are, of course, welcome to claim i fall into this category too!) I almost didn't jump into this discussion because it seems so polarized and rash compared to a lot of others I think i'm just going to leave it alone because it's not clear to me the discussion is going to get any more reasonable.
- JimboOmega 10y ago
  Google has never made it that clear what position I was interviewing for (and definitely not what team/role) when I interviewed with them. This was sort of pitched as a selling point, since after being hired you'd float around and find the niche eventually?
  - DannyBee 10y ago
    When was this? This was the case when i started (~2006), but it definitely changed and is not the case anymore.
janoc 10y ago
They really don't. I have been called by one of their headhunters recently who explicitly refused to tell me what sort of position I would be interviewing for. He told me that: "That is not how we work. We will evaluate your abilities and then, if you pass, offer you a position on a team that we deem best fitting your skills." Needless to say I have thanked him for his time and declined. I am not going to fly to another country to be grilled with stupid coding interviews only to be offered an entry level job on a team I am not interested in. Another such thing was an invitation from Amazon's HR for an "accelerated testing session" where I was expected to go for a full day of coding tests (together with many others) and then they would pick who they invite for real interviews later where you may learn what sort of position they might offer you. Again, no idea what position/job you are interviewing for and wasted entire vacation day - for their convenience. System clearly targeting 20-somethings straight out of school. No, thanks. The questions from the original article are familiar - but these are often external staffing agencies doing these pre-screens today. Google used to do it in-house with actually technically very competent HR staffers (I have done a few phone calls with someone in their California HQ back in 2002ish), but now if I get contacted by them every now and then it is always an external headhunter. The staffing agencies employees tend to be very technically incompetent. Basically, they often have no idea whatsoever about the technical requirements for the position they are trying to fill. They only match keywords on the CVs in their database (often LinkedIn profiles, etc.) against the keywords in the job description, then they spam everyone that matches with an excited mail about having a "perfect match job". The matches are usually on the completely generic stuff like "C++", "Python" that everyone has on their CV, so in most cases the "dream job" is anything but - in a field the person knows nothing about or is not interested in. I have been literally hounded for weeks by a headhunter once for a position that I had zero qualification for (Windows/.NET stuff - I was mostly Unix guy back then). It finally turned out that she wanted me only because I spoke/understood the Czech language. And she fully expected me to move to a "sweatshop" that company had in Czech Republic, trying to do a job I knew nothing about and paying less money that I had as teaching assistant at a university at the time. Some people are just nuts. The phone screens are the same story - the headhunter has a script provided by their client with a bunch of keywords they are looking for in the answers. They are basically playing bingo with the candidate's answers, ticking off the "correct" keywords. Don't expect them to actually understand what they are asking. They can't - this week they are recruiting a Google engineer and next week they would be trying to fill a civil engineering position and a week later perhaps a chemistry lab technician. I believe this is exactly what happened here. I have been in a similar situation before myself (not with Google). The hiring managers are complaining about how hard is it to hire talent, but why are they then wasting everyone's time with incompetent HR agencies, pointless phone screens that filter out even good candidates and stupid coding tests. Ask for references (I will be happy to provide), ask to see some code at the interview, check my public code (Github for ex), hire for a trial period. But give me a break with this ridiculous testing/screening nonsense. Nobody else except software engineers seems to have to put up with this type of crap.

by ozgung 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

raverbashing 10y ago

It seems to me parent's answer only reflects the general attitude at Google: they don't question anything they do, they don't do "customer support" and they don't display humility Yes, I'm not expecting the conversation to have been exactly that, but it shows problems regardless.

kyrra 10y ago
Google questions a lot of what it does. It's made up of lots of engineers and other that are on this site and care deeply about the fields we are in. We are always questioning decisions made and try to use data as best as we can to back up those decision. As for customer support, it depends on the product you are talking about. Your free gmail account or $5 purchases through the play store: don't expect a lot of support here (but there is some). If you are using Google Cloud, Apps, AdWords, or other products where you pay, you can expected to get amazing support (this will change with your spend level). For example: on the cloud side, you can pay for support contracts that gets you lots of 1-on-1 time with Google support staff to help you use the services[0]. Or with the new Pixel, there is on-phone support[1]. [0] https://cloud.google.com/support/ https://cloud.google.com/support/ [1] https://madeby.google.com/phone/support/ https://madeby.google.com/phone/support/
- raverbashing 10y ago
  I am aware of these support channels, but there are a lot of stories of paying customers getting stonewalled. Not to mention cases where non-paying customers or content producers get simply kicked out without recourse - though sometimes Google (and others) are right to act in a certain way
  - ghufran_syed 10y ago
    I used to have project fi, their customer support was quick and helpful, even for complicated things like when the porting out of my number got stuck (not their fault, it was the other carrier)
rasz_pl 10y ago
Listen, you have been hired by the greatest software company on the planet, you survived ridiculous recruitment process with multiple pointless whiteboard interviews, CLEARLY you are special. How dare those unworthy peons slander the name of your company? they arent qualified, you are. "customer support"? You are not being paid >200K to sit 8 hours in a chat telling people to turn it off and on again.

rb2k_ 10y ago

> they found a 20+ years experienced engineering manager holding patents on computer networking under-qualified for an ordinary site maintenance position. To be fair, I've interviewed people at previous companies that had patents and 15 years at IBM on their CV and completely failed even the most basic system / coding questions. (fizzbuzz style). There are a lot of people that read great on the CV but then it turns out that they mostly kept a chair warm and organized meetings over the last decade without actually retaining any technical knowledge. Not saying that was the case here, but it happens and it's probably worth checking people on their stated qualifications.

johndubchak 10y ago
Perhaps that suggests you're giving them the wrong interview.
- optimuspaul 10y ago
  I agree. Why the hell would you ask someone at that level basic questions like fizz buzz? It's absurd. I also tend to shy away from asking coding questions in interviews, they don't tell me much about aptitude for critical thinking and culture fit. Skills can be taught but culture is much harder. ... But I'm not saying to throw in some questions that don't prove that they are actually competent, just be casual about it.
  - sziwan 10y ago
    > Why the hell would you ask someone at that level basic questions like fizz buzz? Because there are people applying for software engineering jobs that still can't answer those questions.
    - rizzom5000 10y ago
      If you have a CS degree and cannot answer this type of question in your language of choice, you simply aren't ready for even a junior position in my opinion. This type of coding exercise can potentially answer more questions about the candidate in two minutes than 30 minutes of softball questions about the candidate's past experiences. I think that people who disagree simply haven't done much interviewing or haven't worked on a team with someone who couldn't do much more than copy/paste code from SO.

Morgawr 10y ago

This to me looks like an initial phone screening interview. It's not actually a "technical" interview (there is no code to write and the person that interviews you is a technical recruiter and not an actual engineer). As far as I know (I might be wrong so take this with a grain of salt) your first screening interview is usually used to decide in which direction you want to proceed (for example if you want to be hired as a SWE-SRE or SE-SRE position). It's not far fetched to think that they were just applying some standard questions without having an actual clear position in mind yet. I also agree with the grandparent, I'd be very sceptical about this transcript being 100% accurate.

kerneis 10y ago
This. I passed several rounds of interviews at Google over a number of years (phone screening, phone interview, on-site). This is definitely a phone screening, where the recruiter expects "standard" answers to "standard" questions. Remember that interviews are somewhat of a game. Trying to be smart at this stage is the wrong move.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  > This is definitely a phone screening, where the recruiter expects "standard" answers to "standard" questions. I went through a Google phone screen once. (For full disclosure, I've interviewed on-site twice and failed that both times.) One problem posed on the phone screen involved finding the last 1 in an infinite array consisting of a finite number of 1s followed by an infinite number of 0s. I described the search strategy "check index 0/1/2, then progressively square the index until a 0 is found, then use binary search to find the first 0". The screener objected to that strategy on the grounds that successive squaring "grew too fast" and successively doubling the index would be faster overall. Once the call concluded, I looked into it and determined that those two strategies are almost exactly equivalent. This didn't leave me impressed with the phone screen process. Then again, I apparently passed the screen despite making that "mistake". Still, I think the least courtesy you can extend to interviewees is to not correct them when they're right and you're wrong. :/

bluecmd 10y ago

> ordinary site maintenance position Seems you don't know much what Google's SRE job is about.

DannyBee 10y ago

First, it is definitely standard process to tell him (if they didn't, that's a definite failure). Again, remember you only have one side of the story here. I like to try to gather facts before assuming things. IE Ready, aim, fire, not fire, ready, aim. Admittedly more difficult in this case (and certainly, i have no access to it) Second i'm going to point out a few things: Experience may translate into wisdom, it may not. Plenty of companies promote people just because they last long enough. So 20 years experience managing may translate into a high level manager, it may not! I hold a bunch of patents too on compilers and other things, it's not indicative of much in terms of skill, because almost anything is patentable. Lastly, SRE is not an ordinary site maintenance position by any means. I"m not even sure where to begin to correct that. I guess i'd start here: https://landing.google.com/sre/interview/ben-treynor.html https://landing.google.com/sre/interview/ben-treynor.html Does this mean this person is under/overqualified/exactly right? I literally have no idea. I just don't think it's as obvious one way or the other. "Well, that sounds like a dumb recruitment process." Judging an entire recruitment process based on one side of a story from a person who's clearly upset about an interview, and even 3 sentences i wrote on hacker news, seems ... silly. If you want to do it, okay. But everyone in this entire thread seems to be making snap judgements without a lot of critical thinking. That makes me believe a lot of people here have a ton of pre-existing biases they are projecting onto this in one direction or the other (and you are, of course, welcome to claim i fall into this category too!) I almost didn't jump into this discussion because it seems so polarized and rash compared to a lot of others I think i'm just going to leave it alone because it's not clear to me the discussion is going to get any more reasonable.

JimboOmega 10y ago
Google has never made it that clear what position I was interviewing for (and definitely not what team/role) when I interviewed with them. This was sort of pitched as a selling point, since after being hired you'd float around and find the niche eventually?
- DannyBee 10y ago
  When was this? This was the case when i started (~2006), but it definitely changed and is not the case anymore.

janoc 10y ago

They really don't. I have been called by one of their headhunters recently who explicitly refused to tell me what sort of position I would be interviewing for. He told me that: "That is not how we work. We will evaluate your abilities and then, if you pass, offer you a position on a team that we deem best fitting your skills." Needless to say I have thanked him for his time and declined. I am not going to fly to another country to be grilled with stupid coding interviews only to be offered an entry level job on a team I am not interested in. Another such thing was an invitation from Amazon's HR for an "accelerated testing session" where I was expected to go for a full day of coding tests (together with many others) and then they would pick who they invite for real interviews later where you may learn what sort of position they might offer you. Again, no idea what position/job you are interviewing for and wasted entire vacation day - for their convenience. System clearly targeting 20-somethings straight out of school. No, thanks. The questions from the original article are familiar - but these are often external staffing agencies doing these pre-screens today. Google used to do it in-house with actually technically very competent HR staffers (I have done a few phone calls with someone in their California HQ back in 2002ish), but now if I get contacted by them every now and then it is always an external headhunter. The staffing agencies employees tend to be very technically incompetent. Basically, they often have no idea whatsoever about the technical requirements for the position they are trying to fill. They only match keywords on the CVs in their database (often LinkedIn profiles, etc.) against the keywords in the job description, then they spam everyone that matches with an excited mail about having a "perfect match job". The matches are usually on the completely generic stuff like "C++", "Python" that everyone has on their CV, so in most cases the "dream job" is anything but - in a field the person knows nothing about or is not interested in. I have been literally hounded for weeks by a headhunter once for a position that I had zero qualification for (Windows/.NET stuff - I was mostly Unix guy back then). It finally turned out that she wanted me only because I spoke/understood the Czech language. And she fully expected me to move to a "sweatshop" that company had in Czech Republic, trying to do a job I knew nothing about and paying less money that I had as teaching assistant at a university at the time. Some people are just nuts. The phone screens are the same story - the headhunter has a script provided by their client with a bunch of keywords they are looking for in the answers. They are basically playing bingo with the candidate's answers, ticking off the "correct" keywords. Don't expect them to actually understand what they are asking. They can't - this week they are recruiting a Google engineer and next week they would be trying to fill a civil engineering position and a week later perhaps a chemistry lab technician. I believe this is exactly what happened here. I have been in a similar situation before myself (not with Google). The hiring managers are complaining about how hard is it to hire talent, but why are they then wasting everyone's time with incompetent HR agencies, pointless phone screens that filter out even good candidates and stupid coding tests. Ask for references (I will be happy to provide), ask to see some code at the interview, check my public code (Github for ex), hire for a trial period. But give me a break with this ridiculous testing/screening nonsense. Nobody else except software engineers seems to have to put up with this type of crap.